BLOCKCHAIN AND GAM­ING

need five things you how this to know about gam­ing tech could change

1 so, breaking down things to the ba­sics here, blockchain is es­sen­tially peer-to-peer file shar­ing gone large and su­per en­crypted, but what that means for you is there’s no mid­dle­man hold­ing onto your data or leas­ing you ac­cess to the things you make (pro­files, char­ac­ters, save data, etc.). it be­longs to you, giv­ing you the power over it, in­clud­ing the op­tion to sell it if you wish.

CROSS-PLAT­FORM IDEN­TITY

2 since it all be­longs to you, you’re also able to take it any­where you like. so cre­ate an avatar in one game, build up credit in a par­tic­u­lar ser­vice, and there’s no rea­son why that shouldn’t be trans­fer­able to some­thing else. it cre­ates the op­por­tu­nity for mas­sive shared ex­pe­ri­ences across plat­forms, ti­tles and apps.

TRAD­ING DIG­I­TAL CON­TENT

3 since the blockchain sys­tem keeps records of trans­ac­tions, if you buy some­thing it be­longs to you, pe­riod. no one can copy it or fake it. it’s yours. so if you were to buy a dig­i­tal game us­ing blockchain, you ba­si­cally have a proof of pur­chase built in. and now, you could the­o­ret­i­cally sell that on. yes, we mean dig­i­tal trade-ins are per­fectly plau­si­ble within blockchain cre­at­ing a dig­i­tal sec­ond-hand mar­ket.

NOTH­ING HAS TO DIE

4 blockchain is de­cen­tralised and open source, so files are si­mul­ta­ne­ously stored and en­crypted in mul­ti­ple lo­ca­tions. if a game launched its on­line plat­form through a blockchain, that would mean the com­mu­nity es­sen­tially pro­tected it. if the de­vel­oper went bust for some rea­son or moved on, the game could be run­ning for as long as the play­ers kept it alive.

IT’S SE­CURE

5 blockchain has been used to trans­fer cryp­tocur­ren­cies for years now, and by en­crypt­ing ev­ery piece of data and then bounc­ing it around a de­cen­tralised net­work of nodes, it’s all but im­pos­si­ble to hack, from what we un­der­stand.

That should mean bet­ter data pro­tec­tion for us as con­sumers, and pos­si­bly more sta­ble net­works for gam­ing.

Cryp­tokit­ties is one of the most suc­cess­ful ex­am­ples of a game that has adopted Blockchain and cryp­tocur­ren­cies as part of its model. if a game like call of duty were to adopt a Blockchain model or even cre­ate its own cryp­tocur­rency that could have a mas­sive im­pact.